Paul Jaray

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Unlike many of his peers in engineering and design, Paul Jaray saw the mode of transportation that made him most esteemed vanish entirely, literally sent down in flames by the coming of war. The principles that he took away from building rigid airships were transferred, very much intact, into several highly memorable automobiles that are still considered advanced today. Jaray was a pure aeronautical and aerodynamic thinker, not a marketer of cars, so his remarkable achievements don't always get their deserved recognition.
Jaray was born in Vienna in 1889. He enrolled in some of the earliest university-level studies of aeronautics to exist. By the time that Jaray had graduated with his doctorate of engineering, war was clearly on the horizon for Europe. The lighter-than-air rigid craft most notably created by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was seen as having strong potential value for battlefield surveillance and for silently dropping artillery shells onto ground targets (the aerial bomb, designed to be dropped from an airplane with at least some degree of accuracy, was not developed until partway through World War I).
Accounts of that time period indicated that the Zeppelin Company, the count's massive works in Friedrichshafen, was a morass of intrigues and complacency, despite their airship's critical role in the German war effort. With little support from his peers, Jaray undertook a full re-engineering of the existing Zeppelin designs, determining that giving it a teardrop structure in cross-section rather than the customary bullet-nosed mailing tube shape made the Zeppelins faster and stronger, although by then the war was lost. Jaray's advances were incorporated into future German rigid airships, including the Hindenburg.
When that Zeppelin exploded into aviation folklore in 1937, Jaray had already left the design of aircraft and switched to cars. By 1921, he had been awarded a patent for an automobile shape that was created using sheet steel and aluminum, materials that were familiar to him. Its basis was the Ley automobile of Arnstadt, Germany, previously known as the Lorelei. But at Friedrichshafen, the car was comically tall and narrow, but used the same teardrop cross-section that Jaray had created for Zeppelin, and had an incredible drag coefficient of just 0.29. That caught the attention of Hans Ledwinka, who incorporated Jaray's theories into his radical rear-engine Tatra cars.
By 1927, Jaray had established a presence in the United States, owned a U.S. patent on streamlining, and had an office in New York. Jaray had some competition, ranging from Buckminster Fuller to William R. Stout and Tom Tjaarda. Then, in 1934, Chrysler unveiled the Airflow, intended to salute the corporation's 10th anniversary. Instead, Jaray had Chrysler served with legal papers (and also Pierce-Arrow, over its original Silver Arrow). Jaray won the suit, but was awarded only $5,000 plus promises of royalties on the Airflow, which had already flopped in the marketplace by then. The Depression had bulldozed Pierce-Arrow out of producing luxury cars, too.
It would be unfair to call Jaray's courtroom win a pyrrhic victory. While the lawyers fought, another prominent car guy took close notice of Jaray's wind-cheating skills. His name was Ferdinand Porsche. Jaray was vindicated as an automotive consultant in the coming years, with a career that well outlasted both the great German airships and World War II. He died in 1974.

This article originally appeared in the October, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.